Heavy Rain Taps Real Anxieties for Massive Story

by David Zax

A few years ago, in a crowded shopping mall, game designer David Cage lost track of his son. Cage thought his wife was looking after Quentin; his wife thought the opposite. Cage rushed about, frantic, calling out Quentin’s name. The darkest thoughts rushed through his head: What if he never saw his son again?

Then, just as suddenly as the ordeal began, it was over. His son had wandered over to the videogame store, where he had been spotted by an alert clerk. The scare had lasted just five minutes, “but they were the longest five minutes of my life,” says Cage. “It was something really strong. I guess the story of Heavy Rain comes from these five minutes.”

Near the beginning of Heavy Rain, Cage’s new game for PlayStation 3, a young architect named Ethan Mars visits a shopping mall with his wife and children. Ethan pauses to buy a balloon for his son, and while he’s paying the clown, his son slips away. The player, as Ethan, sees the balloon bobbing in the distance of the teeming mall, and rushes toward it — but it’s a different child, a different balloon.

Simulated parental anxiety: It’s the latest gameplay innovation from Cage and his Parisian studio, Quantic Dream, which has been laboring for the last several years to bring a very different experience to gaming. At times, Cage’s vision seems hopelessly out of step with the gaming zeitgeist: As the Wiimote has brought a breathless physicality to gaming, Cage has criticized it for reducing games to “toys.”

As games like Grand Theft Auto have emphasized sandbox-style play, and others like LittleBigPlanet have encouraged the boundless creative freedom of the gamer, Cage has made elaborately scripted games over which he towers as the central artist (his colleagues admiringly call him a videogame auteur.)

Yet despite his willful bucking of these positive trends in gaming, Cage is one of the most closely watched developers following his 2004 release, Indigo Prophecy. That game was praised especially for its story, which followed a man who wakes from a trance in a diner to find himself holding a bloodied knife over a fresh corpse. Though it faltered somewhat on implementation (a wonky control scheme, a slapdash ending), in its stronger moments it achieved the suspense of one of Hitchcock’s wrong-man films. Cage even gave himself a Hitchcockian cameo in the game’s opening tutorial.

But Indigo Prophecy was in some ways just a dry run for Heavy Rain, which will be one of Sony’s most heavily-promoted titles this year. One day in August, I paid Cage a visit in Quantic Dream’s studios on the outskirts of Paris to see the production of Heavy Rain in action.

The floor was abuzz in activity, with everyone rushing to polish a new scene to be debuted at a European videogame conference, where Cage was to also deliver the keynote on “Writing Interactive Narrative for a Mature Audience.” All around me, animators and testers toyed with various moments from a scene meant to illustrate a facet of Heavy Rain that Cage has called “bending storylines.”

In the scene, players control a private investigator caught in the back of a store while a robbery unfolds. Depending on the player’s choices, the private investigator might wind up shot, the storekeeper might be killed, or the thug might be knocked unconscious or convinced to slip away before things escalate. The decisions made in this scene ramify, leading to different outcomes in future scenes.

To account for all the branching possibilities, the Heavy Rain script ran 2,000 pages long, and involved 170 days with actors in the motion-capture studio in Quantic Dream’s basement. Featuring 12 hours of finished animation, Heavy Rain is the “largest motion-capture endeavor, ever,” according to Cage’s collaborator Guillaume de Fondaumière.

The hold-up scene was dramatic, but others center on decisions much more mundane. One scene involves little more than feeding your child and urging him to do his homework. Was Cage worried, I asked, that some gamers might complain that Heavy Rain, like Indigo Prophecy, was weak on gameplay? His response had the patient tone of someone used to responding to skeptics.

“When you think about what interacting means in games, it’s shooting, or killing, or being as fast as possible,” Cage said. “This is what people call ‘gameplay.’ But I think it can be so much more than that. Interacting basically means changing something in your environment, but it could be changing your relationship with someone, it could be changing the way something looks, it could be so many different things that are more subtle than that.”

It’s a novel idea, but a commercially risky one. Several months later, I finally got a trial version of the first few “chapters” of Heavy Rain, and I decided to give it the toughest test I could think of: I invited my friend Matt to play it with me. The most unapologetic philistine of a gamer I know, Matt was reluctant, not seeing the “point of a game where you don’t kill people.”

And indeed, Heavy Rain proved a tough sell. At the part of the game where I had to press the thumbstick gently so as to not cut myself while shaving, Matt said, “I don’t like doing this shit in real life. Why would I pay money to do it in a videogame?” Later, when, with another sweep of the thumbstick, I buckled a seatbelt in my sedan, Matt said sarcastically: “This is going to set the gaming world on fire!?”

But as he grew accustomed to the game’s rhythms and its internal logic, even he had to occasionally admit that there was something interesting about it. “Well, that was kind of cool,” he might mutter now and again, while I directed Ethan to play with his kids, or push through the teeming crowds of the fateful shopping mall.

During my visit at Quantic Dream, I asked Cage about the heartfelt note to his son Quentin that he included in the credits to Indigo Prophecy: An apology for all the weekends and afternoons missed playing with the boy while his father was busy making something for others to play with. Cage, bags under his eyes, said he was doing better, though “not as good as I’d like” — many an evening and weekend was still sacrificed to his work. He told me, though, that on one occasion he’d been able to make work and life intersect. He had had Quentin come into the office and do some of the motion-capture for one of Ethan Mars’ sons, Sean.

Now I was playing one of these scenes in which Ethan, recently separated from his wife, was trying to patch relations with Sean. Father and son sat on a park bench as rain fell lightly from an overcast sky. When I directed Ethan to ask questions about school, Sean gave terse, grudging answers. Soon, I had Ethan reach into Sean’s backpack, where I found a boomerang.

With a few presses of the right shoulder buttons, and a swift downward flick of the controller, I shot the boomerang into the air, nabbing it just as it spun back. Sean applauded me, genuinely impressed, and soon I was giving pointers on Sean’s own throwing technique. With a few well-timed button presses, I had regained the admiration of my son, and it felt as satisfying as taking down the toughest of bosses.

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